Our interview with the choreographer William Forsythe below contains the following statement:"There may be some truth in Forsythe's assertion that [his new work] Three Atmospheric Studies is the most powerful assessment of the war in Iraq." We are happy to make it clear that the assertion was made by Sadler's Wells theatre and not by Mr Forsythe.

While there are few explicit political references in Three Atmospheric Studies, the new work by choreographer William Forsythe, its incendiary climax leaves little doubt of the subject matter. In the opening scene, a young man is abducted. This is followed by a stylised aerial bombardment. Then there is a bizarre missing person's report, filed in semaphore and Arabic. Finally, a svelte politician appears: a dainty female Rumsfeld, mouthing platitudes in the lazy drawl of Bush. Soon, full-scale dance warfare is threatening to break out. A choreographic exchange of fire seems inevitable.

Deafening beatbox explosions rip through the auditorium, rockets screech, missiles roar. As the metaphorical shells fly in, imagined shrapnel tears the dancers into shreds of movement. "They become bodies and only bodies," says Forsythe, explaining why dance is the ideal vehicle for his message. "And the final fact of war is that bodies get ripped up, shot through, blown up. In dance, you have those bodies in front of you, engaged in acts of acute attention, utterly focused on the present."

Never one for modesty, Forsythe's claims for Three Atmospheric Studies, which premieres next month at London's Sadler's Wells, verge on the titanic. "I don't think there is anything out there quite like it," he says, in the vast former tram depot in Frankfurt that serves as a base for his company. The accompanying press blurb goes further. "The most damning comment," it proclaims, "on the horror, personal devastation and hypocrisy produced in any art form since the Iraq war began."

Forsythe is not the first to attempt to employ dance in the service of political imperatives. This accolade goes to pioneers such as Kurt Jooss, whose Green Table set the anti-war standard back in 1932, and groups such as the Workers' Dance League in the 1930s, whose slogan blared: "Dance is a weapon in the revolutionary class struggle." More recently, there seems to have been a deluge of politically committed works: from Bill T Jones's Still/Here in 1994 on the Aids epidemic, to Promethean Fire, Paul Taylor's musing on 9/11, as well as his most recent piece about Bush and his inner circle, Banquet of Vultures.

In the UK, we have had Siobhan Davies' environmental piece Endangered Species, created during a trip to Antarctica, the social and sexual politics of Lloyd Newson's DV8 Physical Theatre, and Darshan Singh Bhuller's Planted Seeds, a tale of love and death set during the war in Bosnia. These works inevitably pose questions about dance's relationship with political content. Can a non-verbal artform that has been obsessed for centuries with notions of rarified beauty have anything profound to say about social and political problems? What makes choreographers believe they can flounce around the biggest issues of our time?

For dance purists, brought up on the abstract traditions of Balanchine and Merce Cunningham, the answer is simple: dance should remain unpolluted by politics. Perhaps the most infamous of all such critics is former New Yorker dance writer Arlene Croce, who was responsible for igniting one of the most vicious and long-running episodes in the US culture wars of the late 1980s and 1990s when she branded Jones's Still/Here as "victim art" in 1994 and refused to review it.

Croce rarely speaks publicly these days, but did break her silence in a faxed statement to me: "Choreographers mix dance with politics because it is the only way to get attention. And get grants too, probably. The importance of a work is equated with the nobility of the sentiment it expresses. I've stopped attending dance attractions because the last thing I want to see is dancers wasting their time on some high-minded godawful piece of choreography. I don't want to be told about Iraq or Bush or Katrina by someone younger and dumber than I am."

Reading excerpts from the fax to Jones threatened to rekindle the feud. "I can't believe she would say such a stupid thing," he gasped. "Does she think that all the dancers working in the 1930s, making work that was very social-minded, were they all trying to get 'attention'?"

In the 1930s, dance and politics were all part of the same revolution, with many of the dancers from Martha Graham's company effortlessly wafting over to the Workers' Dance League. Despite her proclamation that "propaganda is one subject I will not allow to be discussed in my studio", even Graham, doyenne of high-modernism, was soon getting in on the act, first with Immediate Tragedy (1937), then with the anguished solo Deep Song (1937), both created as a commentary on the Spanish Civil War.

This new turn in Graham's work, and her devotion to narrative, sent many scuttling into pure abstraction, most notably Merce Cunningham, who dominated the dance scene in America from the 1960s almost to the end of the century. Political work was still being made, such as Alvin Ailey's masterful Revelations (1960), which dealt with slavery and discrimination - but it was abstract movement that formed the dominant anti-politics credo, the notion that dance in itself, the shifting of bodies in space, was incapable of saying anything useful on a political level. "In the 60s and 70s," Croce wrote in her fax, "there were dances about Vietnam and civil rights and so on, but they weren't dances that affected the stature of the art and the direction it was to take ... What we wanted was dancing about dance."

This political isolationism has been blown apart by the rise of dance-theatre, created almost single-handedly by German visionary Pina Bausch, who fused movement with dramatic text. Suddenly, dance can be an open forum again, with the versatility to accommodate politics, dissent and protest. "Art can and does do whatever it wants to do," says Jones. "Not what connoisseurs would like it to do. That is the lifeblood of art. Art breaks rules, even rules of what is considered most beautiful." For many choreographers, it is precisely the unruly, undancerly political aspects that appeal. "Dance excluded all the life concerns I was interested in: religion, politics, sexuality, psychology, class," says Lloyd Newson, director of DV8. "The people who come to work with us don't want to just keep dancing for the sake of it. They want to keep thinking."

If these qualities invite accusations of preachy opportunism, then, says Jones, bring it on: "Yeah, you know what - sometimes artists are trying to get attention. They are trying to get attention for an idea or a belief."

"I'm a citizen," says Forsythe. "And I have the opportunity to speak in public and many people don't. Dance happens to be the medium I have access to. I feel obligated on some level to use it to make a comment."

In Three Atmospheric Studies, he has created a complex work that harnesses almost everything in dance's arsenal to make his political point. In one sequence, his dancers create living snapshots inspired by Iraq war photography, as well as scenes from German renaissance painter Lucas Cranach's depictions of the Resurrection. "It's an examination of various pictures of political killing," he says.

Ironically, it is only when we get away from Forsythe's convoluted monologues - verbose and sometimes arcane, about clouds, battlefields, and political diatribes - and into the realm of pure movement that Three Atmospheric Studies reveals its power.

In the frenetic opening, dancers rock back and forth, stutter and rewind, strain their necks to look to the sky for incoming missiles, while in the final climax, the beatbox battle pins the audience to the back of their seats. There really is no other option than to contemplate bodies, beautiful bodies, being dismembered and ripped apart. As a purely physical statement, it achieves some profundity.

The ultimate question of whether pieces like this can have any impact - outside that of the aesthetic - rocks even the unflappable proselytiser Jones. "I am quite conflicted on this," he says. "Whenever you stick your neck out, you're stating the obvious. You're preaching to the choir."

There may be some truth in Forsythe's assertion that Three Atmospheric Studies is the most powerful artistic assessment of the war in Iraq. Outside the movies, where action and heroism are underscored, there has been little engagement. Perhaps, as in the 1930s and the 1960s, it really is left to choreographers - often unrivalled in fearlessness, self-belief and occasional naivety - to tackle such gargantuan issues. "The fact that we are doing this changes fuck all," Forsythe concludes. "But if it contributes to the general feeling, if it is another drop in the stream of dissent that flows far to the places of power, then it is worth it, even if it is a little trickle. It's better to say something than to say nothing at all."

· Three Atmospheric Studies is at Sadler's Wells, London EC1R, October 11-14. Box office: 0870 7377737.

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About this article

John O'Mahony on dance and politics

This article appeared on p18 of the G2 section of the Guardian
on Wednesday 27 September 2006.
It was published on
the Guardian website
at 08.20 EDT on Thursday 28 September 2006.
It was last modified at 06.14 EST on Thursday 26 February 2009.
It was first published at 08.20 EDT on Tuesday 10 October 2006.